Johannesburg - ‘We shot the wrong people, it’s not them.”
These are the first words that a Joburg man heard as he crawled out of the bullet-riddled Mercedes-Benz Kompressor after gunmen had opened fire on them, killing his wife and injuring him and other passengers on a busy road in KwaZulu-Natal.
As an injured Sizwe Thambekwayo looked into the barrels of the assailants’ guns, he was sure the gunmen would finish him and the survivors off.
The men were part of a group responsible for the hail of bullets that killed the Vlakfontein man’s wife a few minutes before.
That’s when he heard the words.
“We shot the wrong people, it’s not them.”
The men jumped into their cars and fled, he said.
The 49-year-old said on Tuesday they had left Joburg in the early hours of Saturday to attend a cousin’s wedding in Ezakheni, KwaZulu-Natal.
In his cousin Pini Hlomuka’s new Mercedes-Benz was Thambekwayo, his wife Phindile, his 19-year-old niece Jacqui, and Hlomuka’s wife Happy.
His brother Teddy Msimang and eight others were travelling in a VW Kombi.
They made their way back to Joburg at about 4.30pm after the wedding, and Msimang - who was driving in front of them – got lost and took a right turn instead of going left at a T-junction, Thambekwayo said.
The rest of the group followed him and tried to attract his attention, when they heard a loud bang. They thought a car behind had rammed into them, but realised they were being shot at.
“We were all screaming. Pini lost control of the car. It turned and faced the other direction. The shooting continued and we fell into a trench. They must have shot at us about 16 times,” he said.
“As Happy, Jacqui and I got out of the car, our hands raised in the air, two men were standing outside, pointing guns at us. There were two other men seated in the car. As soon as we got out, one of the men in the car said ‘We shot the wrong people, it’s not them’.”
Thambekwayo was shot once in the abdomen.
Pini and Jacqui suffered graze wounds to the head.
Happy was shot three times in the shoulder. Phindile was shot five times: four times in the back and once in the neck.
“We took her out of the car and Happy tried to administer first aid, because she is a nurse. But she could only open her eyes when we called her name,” Thambekwayo said.
Despite Happy’s efforts, Phindile died at the scene.
A taxi driver who witnessed the shooting collided with a truck, resulting in more people dying. The bodies of the dead and injured were scattered across the road.
Phindile’s mother Adelaide Gumede recalled how excited Phindile had been the day before the wedding.
“She had said: ‘I’ll be beautiful tomorrow, I’ll be in all-white’. It’s as if she knew her time to go was near, hence she chose that outfit. What can I say about the fact she was killed due to mistaken identity? I take everything and give it to God.”
Last year, Gumede’s sister and 17 others were involved in an accident about 3km away from the spot where Phindile was shot dead.